CK Birla Hospitals Improves Financial Close Processes by Migrating SAP to the AWS Cloud

CKBH has implemented SAP S/4HANA, an enterprise resource planning tool for inventory management, financial reporting, and accounting, as a backbone for their supply chain and financial processes. The SAP application communicates in real time to the Hospital Information System (HIS), which manages and organizes all healthcare-related data, including electronic medical records, patient registration, admission and discharge, and billing. 

As patient numbers grew by 40 percent between 2020 and 2022, the co-located, on-premises infrastructure was unable to handle the increased traffic demands, which led to frequent downtimes. This impacted the daily operations of the business, including processes like financial reconciliation, vendor payments, and inventory management. CKBH was also unable to update its SAP S/4HANA to the latest version, which prevented the hospital from taking advantage of newer features to achieve better integration of its systems and seamless data exchange.

While procuring new server hardware would increase storage and computing capacity, it would mean a large CAPEX investment, a lengthy procurement process, and huge effort from internal IT teams. By CKBH’s estimates, the new hardware would have cost an additional US$250,000. 

CKBH's IT teams also needed to spend effort manually updating its security framework as the hospital handles up to 1 terabyte-worth of highly sensitive medical and financial data of its patients.

In the first part of its digital transformation journey, CKBH worked with AWS and AeonX Digital Solutions Private Limited, an AWS Technology Partner, to migrate the hospital’s SAP S/4HANA from a co-located, on-premises deployment to the cloud.

After upgrading SAP S/4HANA on AWS to the latest version, it now has more seamless integration and faster data flow between CKBH’s existing solutions, such as HIS and SAP Fiori. CKBH also improved the durability of its system from 95.27 percent to 99.95 percent uptime.

SAP on AWS also allows CKBH access to over 200 AWS services. For instance, by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances (Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS),  CKBH can now automatically scale capacity, instances, and storage for its SAP applications. This allows the hospital to handle traffic surges and high data flow volumes at peak periods.

Additionally, the migration of SAP to the AWS Cloud improved CKBH’s compliance and disaster recovery capabilities. With AWS Direct Connect, CKBH can now bypass the public internet and securely transfer data over a private connection to an AWS environment. CKBH also deploys Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and AWS CloudTrail to secure and monitor connections, screen traffic, and restrict instance access within a logically isolated virtual network. In addition, CKBH utilizes AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS EDR) to minimize downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of its SAP. AWS services allow CKBH to have full control over the entire virtual networking environment, while maintaining a high level of data security. 

As part of its migration, the CKBH team worked extensively with AWS to address queries regarding cost, security, and designed a long-term roadmap of its cloud deployment. AWS helped familiarize the team with the new cloud environment by running workshops and hands-on sessions. The SAP migration was completed within four months in October 2022.